(un)documents

August 24, 2018

years ago, in an archive somewhere in a file folder, a ream of white fibre andblack ink stains my name, place of birth, country of origin none of them sound anywhere like herein a file somewhere, the metrics of a lifetime the merits of citizenship unfurljudgment between pages, calculating the time you lived here how long? where? when did you get here?and why?

somewhere in an archive, i am burning soft and young i am pages of testimonies, receipts, report cardscase numbers making up the limbs i lack on the page and somewhere else, my brothers, their papersdeportation proceedings, testimonies, receipts, criminal records scratched and bound and gone andcase numbers making up the limbs they lost leaving and why?

“sin papeles,” we say, “without papers,” but the term is wrong we are wounded libraries of nothing but paperoceans of thin cuts on the skin we lost along the way and here it is how we live, every step recorded, alphabetized, filedand before they raid workplaces, don’t they build files, too? in this country, isn’t there always some piece of paper somewhereour names threatening a safety you think possible, a fiction you lust for and i’d like to imagine an undoing, a less painful way to papera license, a passport, a birth certificate, a visa, a green cardand why?

when we are dead, we will leave behind our bills, our mountains of leases, loan applications, past due notices, our names on envelopesand i’d like to imagine we’d leave our love letters, the notes we passed our longings and poems and prayers and things we scrawled on the walland those are documents, too, proof we were here onceand why.

Jesus I. Valles is an educator and writer-performer in Austin, Texas. He is the recipient of a fellowship from Undocupoets, a group that promotes the work of undocumented poets.